Only Yesterday

After living her whole life in the city, 27-year-old Taeko decides to visit her relatives in the countryside. As she travels, memories of her youth resurface. And after meeting young farmer Toshio, she wonders if she's been true to the dreams of her childhood self.

Opinion

From the critics

Community Activity

Comment

Wonderful beautiful anmiation again by Studio Ghibli...geared towards adults! I was just so impressed and awed. Great story. The actors who did the voice for the English version was perfect too! LOVED it!!!!!

I have to say I don't enjoy this one as much as other Studio Ghibli films. In fact, I fast forwarded a good part of the film where, for example, young siblings are quarreling among themselves. The depiction of the countryside is artistically well-done, and gorgeous to look at. The ending is subtle and in a way surprising.

At first this seems like an odd patchwork of more than one, unrelated storyline, in different styles – until it all falls into place about a quarter of the way through the movie. Taeko is recalling memories of her childhood (not all of them good), and the children in her memory are helping her through some difficult adult feelings. One storyline, that of her childhood, is drawn in a standard anime/manga style. The other, of her adult life, is more realistically depicted, almost as if it tries as hard as possible to not be an animated movie. …Which brings up the question: why did they make this as an animated film, not a “live action” drama? The answer is, I believe, that animation can be great art. As much as “live” acting. In this Studio Ghibli film, they’ve taken topics not usually done in animation, and made a spectacular piece of art from it. The detailed background drawings alone (in an atmospheric, semi-Impressionist style) are enough to qualify it, and the emotional depth of the character depictions is without parallel. It’s probably too slow-moving, nostalgic, and thoughty for kids, but I recommend it for adults.

Such a fantastic Studio Ghibli movie. It has a slower pace, is relaxing to watch, and incredibly relateable. It's a good movie to watch on a rainy day, or to have playing in the background while you work.

A nostalgic, poignant slice-of-life story about a 27-year-old Japanese woman who finds herself besieged by memories of her 4th-grade self while on a trip to the country. This is a love story, but in the most complex sense of the term--it's about discovering new love, rediscovering love that you forgot was there, romantic love and family love, first love and mature love, a love of the people and places that built you into the person you are today, finding a love of the land that you didn't know you were missing, and the courage to love the person you could be. There is an absolutely fabulous flashback about trying pineapple for the first time that brought me to tears for reasons I can't quite grasp.

This is a 1991 Japanese animated drama (おもひでぽろぽろ, which literally means "Memories Come Tumbling Down") written and directed by Isao Takahata, based on the manga of the same title by Hotaru Okamoto and Yuko Tone.
The film explores a genre traditionally thought to be outside the realm of animation, attracting a large adult audience---particularly women.
Taeko, a 27-year-old unmarried woman, has lived her whole life in Tokyo and now works at a company there.
She decides to take a trip to visit the family of the elder brother of her brother-in-law in the rural countryside to help with the safflower harvest and get away from city life.
While traveling at night on a sleeper train to Yamagata, she begins to recall memories of herself as a schoolgirl in 1966, and her intense desire to go on holiday like her classmates, all of whom have family outside of the big city.
She hasn't had her own "rural hometown."
During her stay in Yamagata, she finds herself increasingly nostalgic and wistful for her childhood self, while simultaneously wrestling with adult issues of career and love.
She recalls the first stirrings of childish romance, puberty and growing up, the frustrations of math and boys.
In lyrical switches between the present and the past, Taeko wonders if she has been true to the dreams of her childhood self.
Eventually, Taeko faces her own true self.
The film seems to stir everybody's nostalgia.

The Studio Ghibli animation is impeccable ranging from richly coloured sequences in which grown-up Taeko manoeuvres her way through crowded Tokyo or marvels at a pastoral sunset, to delicate pastel recollections where her younger, more carefree self lives entirely for the moment—staring with momentous anticipation at a fresh pineapple (an expensive rarity for Japanese households in the 60s) to floating in mid-air all the way home after the class cutie shows an interest in her. Anyone who has ever had a childhood will appreciate the haunting poignancy of her vivid memories but at its core this is a "chick flick" for boomers and Taeko’s meandering woolgathering ultimately required the kind of Zen-like patience I was unwilling to give it. Still beautiful to look at and the wistful closing sequence is aimed squarely at the romantic in all of us.